Awkward barrel samples. Weary vignerons. Fully booked hotels. Missed tables. The wine traveller’s path is rarely lined with sunshine and perfectly chilled glasses. 

Which is why Issue 40 of Noble Rot is about good timing — and giving yourself a fighting chance. 

In The Wine Traveller’s Guide to Getting It Right, our man in New York, Levi Dalton, explains when not to visit wine regions, revealing how arriving at the wrong moment can distort your experience of young wines and quietly sabotage tastings before you realise what’s happening. He decodes the rhythms of the cellar, argues for visiting Burgundy in November rather than June (“a rookie mistake”), and shares insider intelligence — from Santorini’s grape harvest colliding disastrously with peak tourist season, to the joys of Piemonte’s porcini season. Along the way, top winemakers, restaurateurs and critics reveal their favourite local places to eat and drink.

Elsewhere, Simon J Woolf offers survival strategies for the awful wines served on long-haul flights, white Alice Feiring reveals the lengths she’d go to secure a decent glass in a restaurant cursed with a truly terrible wine list. 

Talking of good timing, it’s given us Nebuchadnezzars of pleasure to see Pulp return with a new number-one album and one of last year’s genuinely great singles, Spike Island. Which makes it a particular delight to welcome Jarvis Cocker as this issue’s very special interviewee. That he arrived at Noble Rot Mayfair amid rumours of having no intention of drinking was an intriguing beginning — one that, happily, did not last long. This is another vintage Rotter Towers extended-lunch interview.